Visualizing Data

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I’ve started reading The Truthful Art: Data, charts, and maps for communication, by Alberto Cairo. This comes as I backtrack into the book The Functional Art which I’d read last June. My attempts to complete graphic visualizations for each chapter was not completed, so that is part of my ‘backtracking’ tasks. As I’m attuned to visualizations from this reading, it was with interest that I serendipitously came across a couple of blog posts written by Michael Paskevicius about NVivo 12 software. Paskevicius suggests this is a tool to ‘accelerate the literature review’. [NVivo 12 in Action: Accelerating your Literature Review]. This post lead me to another post Visualizing Academic Writing: Beyond the Bibliography where techniques and strategies for mapping out referenced and research articles. This post connects to previous explorations from Dr. Doug Belshaw’s PhD mapping activity (one example among the many shared by M. Paskevicius. Then, another link leads to Beyond the Bibliography a ‘how to’ blog post that lays out steps to create visualizations using spreadsheets and pivot tables, and NodeXL. Paskevicius shares the link to his mindmap of his research as created in Coggle – Constructively aligned OEP, which is worth a closer look, not just for references, but structure and content.

Digging deeper into NVivo as a research collection option might be a great place to start. First, I’ll find out if I can access NVivo through my university. Then, I’ll schedule to watch videos and read resources to begin learning to navigate this software tool.

  1. NVivo 12 for Mac – Let’s Get Started
  2. NVivo training – sign up for a course
  3. NVivo blog – some interesting posts to read including
    1. Remote Researching and Remote Working: Connecting Through Technology
    2. Transcription: More than just words (2019, April 23)
    3. Extending your literature review with NVivo 11 Plus (2017, September 20).
    4. Visualize your research findings, without the bias. (2019, April 8).
    5. Using NVivo to structure a computational ontology (2019, January 28).

This is not to say that other technological tools for my research won’t also become part of my ‘toolbox’, since I have already mentioned NVivo and Gelphi software [previous mention is found in the post From Object to Flow (2018, Feb. 21).].

It’s now time to dip in to see what I can do – mapping out the most recent research from my literature review for the self directed learning course may be the first item to explore.